What you won’t get from that story is the intimate look around his chambers that he also offered.

Appointed by the late President Ronald Reagan in 1986, Hittner’s hand-signed commission hangs prominently in his front office. A less expected sight sits on a little end table to the side of the room: a framed photo of four children in shackles. I sort of expected a story about misbehaving when I asked the judge about the photo. After all, this was the man who had a college kid arrested for not taking jury duty seriously.

The photo is the Christmas card sent by one of his former law clerks, a young man who had brought his quadruplets to meet the judge. The clerk thought it would be funny to take the picture of the kids in chains.

Turns out, there was more to the college kid story, too. She’d actually told the U.S. Marshall’s office to, as Hittner gently put it, “Go jump in a lake.” Once she made amends, the judge didn’t even levy a fine for contempt of court.

Affable and surrounded by sporting memorabilia, Hittner could pass for a Texan — right up until he starts talking. It’s when he’s telling his stories that a Brooklyn accent reveals his New York roots.

Hittner made his way to Texas by way of his Vietnam Era service to the U.S. Army. His entrance into the Army was deferred while he was in law school at New York University, but diploma in hand, he headed to Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga., for infantry training and paratrooper exercises.

That’s right — Hittner’s jumped out of an airplane. Five times.

When he signed up for duty, he had no interest in leaving the New York area, but after his training he ended up stationed in Louisiana.

“Sometimes things happen for the best. They asked where I wanted to be stationed. I said, Fort Hamilton Brooklyn or Fort Dix New Jersey. They said, ‘Sorry, you’re going to Fort Polk, Louisiana,” he said.

“I was a competitive canoeist at the time, so I had the Olympic canoeing coach write to the Pentagon, so to speak, to say I was vital to the U.S. canoeing effort. The letter came right back, ‘Sorry. Canoeing is not that big. Hittner is still going to Fort Polk, Louisiana.'”

Hittner served a two-year stint in the Army, working up to the rank of Captain from second lieutenant. By the time his name was called for combat, he had 11 months left on his commitment and tours of Vietnam were 13 months.

Fort Polk is about halfway up the Texas-Louisiana border, and in 1965, while he was doing infantry work, firing off machine guns and training, Hittner thought about Texas.

He wrote to the University of Texas at Austin for guidance on taking the state’s bar exam.

“To this day, I owe T.J. Gibson, the assistant dean of students,” Hittner said. “He did something that most big eastern law schools never would. He took me to the placement office and said, ‘This is Captain Hittner. He’s a lawyer, and he’s interested in Texas. Open up our full placement files to him.’

"He shook my hand and left. Right then, I said, ‘If they do this for a perfect stranger, I’m going to give this state a try.'”

Hittner started out in Texas with a small oil and gas law firm, the second lawyer in the Midland firm’s Houston office. He got a taste for trial work and unsuccessfully ran for office a couple of times. Then he met former Gov. Dolph Briscoe, who in 1978, appointed him to the 133rd civil district court. A couple of election victories later, Reagan in 1986 named Hittner to the Southern District of Texas in Houston, a lifetime appointment.

I asked him what appealed to him about the law. Was it something his family had pushed him into pursuing?

To the contrary: His father, who died when the judge was just 15 years old, was an electrician. His father was the youngest of 12 children, many of them electricians.

“I just got it in my head that for family tradition, I was going to be an electrical engineer. I took engineering courses at New York University, and it was obvious that I was not going to be an engineer,” Hittner said. “I switched to the pre-law program and went from near-flunking out to the Dean’s List in one semester.”

That explanation may be too simple, Hittner added.

“In engineering, one and one have to equal two; otherwise, the bridge will fall down. In the law business, you could argue to a judge that one and one equals three, and you can get a judge or a jury to go along with it,” he said.

“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a hell of a lot better than using slide rules and all of that stuff to figure out the bridge stresses.'”

To be sure, what the world of electrical engineering missed has resonated with the legal community. Hittner has presided over cases such as the “sleeping lawyer,” ordering a new trial for a man sentenced to death while his defense attorney dozed; the case of a famous thoroughbred, Alydar, who got “whacked” for insurance money (Alydar’s photo hangs outside Hittner’s office); portions of the Enron case; and of course, Stanford.

It was during the initial hearings for Lea Fastow, wife of former Enron finance chief Andrew Fastow, that an attorney said it’s foolish to try to undermine Hittner’s authority.

“He will bristle like a cornered cat,” Houston litigator Brian Wice said at the time.

The description caught Hittner’s attention. Today, a bronze panther is positioned in a menacing manner on the judge’s courtroom desk. He has a 7-year-old Burmese cat named Murray.

In fact, during his tenure, Hittner has been compared to a variety of animals. There’s a toy shark behind his desk in his chambers, a reminder of one ranking that said he’s like a shark that smells blood in the water; a few inches away, you’ll find a couple of knick-knack pigs to recall the ranking that said he was as mean as a biting sow. There’s also an albino gorilla, several sheep and a goat, but the judge refrained from telling me those stories.

Hittner explained that as his law clerks and interns depart, they tend to give him gifts symbolic of their time with the judge.He’s got a recording of the Bette Midler song, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” in homage to the lawyer who sang the song to the jury, and a photo of a narcissus.

Among these trinkets, you’ll find ample evidence of his long dedication to the Boy Scouts of America. Hittner joined when he was 8 years old and has been awarded just about every honor the group bestows, including the 65-year service pin. The only thing he collects is felt sashes from the Order of the Arrow, the Scouts’ national honor society. Three framed mementos hang alongside his desk in chambers.

Having achieved the rank of 33rd Degree Mason himself, Hittner keeps a photo of President Harry Truman, on his desk. Truman also attained the prestigious rank and while he was in the U.S. Senate, served as Grand Master of the Masons.

Truman is probably Hittner’s favorite president.

“He called it as he saw it,” he said. “Maybe he wasn’t right all the time, but he made the tough decisions.”

The item that children are most fascinated by, however, is a white satin "King David" crown given to him by a group of women judges and lawyers for his 59th birthday.

I asked Hittner if it bothers him when people say he’s a difficult jurist or “mean as a biting sow.”

“It’s a job that has to be done, and sometimes you need a firm hand,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that you’re not a personality when you get off the bench.”